Saturday, September 24, 2016

I suspect that core Donald trump supporters who are poorly educated white males would call me an elitist. Then, of course, I'm a "faggot" in their eyes as well, so I am not doubt doubly suspect in their eyes. That said, I find myself feeling like some decent, moral Germans did watching Hitler's rise in the early 1930's and wondering what was wrong with their countrymen. How could they be rallying to a demagogue of questionable sanity? Inexplicably, in my view, other than through an admission that many Americans are not nice and decent people despite their self-congratulations to the contrary, there seems to be little to explain Donald Trump's continued polling that puts him close to Hillary Clinton, but at least for now still behind. Making the situation more bizarre are polls that show a majority of Americans see Trump as a racist madman. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the disturbing phenomenon. Here are excerpts:

As of this writing, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by three
points in the RealClearPoliticsaverageof
national polls, while FiveThirtyEight’s election forecastgives the Republican nominee a 40
percent chance of winning the White House this November.

The fact that an emotionally volatile, authoritarian demagogue — who has
campaigned on his contempt for minority groups and the norms of liberal
democracy — could prove so competitive in a presidential race has led many
pundits to accuse the news mediaof abject failure: Clearly, the fourth
estate has not given the American people an accurate assessment of the choices
before them.

There’s
some sound evidence for this view. The media’s fixation on Hillary Clinton’s
use of a private email server has left much of the public ignorant ofvirtually everything elsethe Democratic nominee brings to the
2016 race.

Meanwhile, Trump is themost
mendacious candidatein
modern American history — and yet voters see him as “more honest and straightforward” than his
opponent. What’s more, even though his economic program consists of supply-side tax cuts and deregulatory schemesthat most Americans oppose — and his
career in business has been marked bycorruptionand incompetence— manypollsshow
a majority of voters saying Trump would be better at handling the economy.

But the Republican nominee boasts many deficiencies that are easy to
convey. It’s not hard to show the public that Trump is bigoted, ill-tempered,
and unpredictable in his behavior — you just need to broadcast his rallies.
And, at that task, cable news has excelled. A pair of new polls show that the
message of those rallies has gotten through to the electorate.

AnAssociated Press–GfK surveyreleased Friday finds that a majority
of Americans think Trump is at least somewhat racist, while 60 percent say he
does not respect ordinary people, and nearly three-quarters say he is neither
civil nor compassionate — a sentiment endorsed by 40 percent of Trump’s own
supporters.

Anew SurveyMonkey pollshows Americans taking an even
darker view of the Republican nominee, with a majority of voters saying Trump
would abuse the power of the presidency to punish his political opponents,
allow the U.S. to default on its debt, inspire “race riots” in major cities,
create a database to track Muslim Americans, and order air strikes against the
families of terrorists.

A
full 46 percent of the electorate says Trump will detonate a nuclear weapon
during his time in office, while 44 percent say he will establish internment
camps for illegal immigrants.

The upshot of both of these surveys, when taken together, is that
Donald Trump hasnotbeen “normalized.” Most Americans see him as a
racist would-be authoritarian who is highly likely to start a nuclear war. The
trouble is, some voters apparently like that in a president.

According
to SurveyMonkey, 48 percent of Trump supporters believe he will create a
database for monitoring Muslims; 33 percent think he’ll let the government
default on its debt; 32 percent say he’ll use the Executive branch’s authority
to persecute political opponents and establish internment camps for the
undocumented; and 22 percent — nearly a quarter — say he’ll probably start a
nuclear war.

Due
to a combination of party polarization, Hillary Clinton’s high unfavorable
numbers, unusually popular third-party candidates — and an openness to
extremism far more widespread in the electorate than most political observers
had realized — it now seems possible that Trump could win the presidency this
November, even as more than half the country sees him as a bigoted madman.

With Virginia being hammered by reduced federal government spending, one of the pushes of Gov. Terry McAuliffe has been to pursue the LGBT tourism dollar. Indeed, McAuliffe has set up and LGBT Tourism Commission (on which some of our friends currently serve) and, unlike members of the Virginia GOP who continue to prostitute themselves to Christian hate groups and extremists, he realizes that being welcoming to all makes good business sense. A piece in the Daily Press looks at this common sense effort that more parts of Virginia need to embrace (after years of lagging, Norfolk has realized the attractiveness of welcoming the pink dollar). Of course, the current anti-LGBT toxicity reigning in North Carolina makes Virginia destinations look even more attractive to many living in the mid-Atlantic region. Here are highlights:

RICHMOND – You
can now buy "Virginia is for Lovers" trucker hats with a gay pride
flag incorporated into the state's iconic tourism pitch.

The hat, and
other state swag, is part of a new branding effort targeting LGBT tourists.
There's a
new web page highlighting events and destinations that have
self-identified as LGBT friendly and a new resource guide for businesses
looking to cash in.

The Virginia
Tourism Corporation rolled out the campaign heading into this weekend, just
ahead of the Virginia Pridefest in Richmond. But this is no limited-time event.

"This is
going to be fully integrated in all our marketing, from top to bottom,"
tourism corporation spokeswoman Caroline Logan said. "This will be going
on forever as far as we're concerned."

Eight
other states have done something similar, but Virginia is the first one in the
South, unless you count Florida. The campaign has been two years in the making,
started by a push from Gov. Terry
McAuliffe, who made clear from before he took office that he wants
everyone to visit Virginia, and to leave lots money.

LGBT tourists –
and that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender – make up 10 percent
of the U.S. tourism market, Logan said. They spend somewhere around $57 billion
a year on travel and tourism, she said.

"They
travel more and they stay longer and they spend more money," she said.

Logan said campaign
feedback has been positive, but the effort is bound to be controversial for
some.

Businesses
and events have to opt into this particular marketing campaign, just as they do
for other targeted state campaigns. The database of places to stay included 120
locations on rollout. Among other things, the website features a picture of
McAuliffe marrying a lesbian couple.

In
addition to the web page and database, the tourism corporation has created an
LGBT Tourism Resource Guide for state businesses in the tourism industry, which
generated an estimated $23 billion in spending last year in the state.

As noted, here's why courting the LGBT tourism dollar makes sense: "they travel more, stay longer and spend more money." Only a fool - or religious extremist of GOP political whore - would not welcome that kind of traveler.

According to some websites, the cesspool of corruption and moral bankruptcy that is the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy was again on display, this time in Mexico where an admitted child rapist has been acquitted by Church authorities. The priest, who is reportedly HIV+ admitted raping 30 young girls between the ages of five and ten years of age in a remote area heavily populated by indigenous people. Other sites such as Patheos report that they Church officials say the named priest doesn't exist or never served on Church rosters. The mere fact that such stories are readily believable speaks volumes about the indifference of a Church hierarchy perhaps motivated by a number of causes, including the fact that the victims and the region lack significant political power and/or relief that the priest was raping girls instead of boys. The truth is that the Church has engaged in lies and cover ups before all across the globe, so that now the expectation exists that the Church is once again lying, My personal take away is that Pope Francis' apologies for the sex abuse scandal are merely a case of crocodile teas and that if one wants moral leadership, the last place to look for morality is the Vatican. Here are highlights on the report on the situation from the Daily Mail:

The Catholic Church has
acquitted an HIV-infected priest who has admitted to raping close to 30 young
girls between the ages of five and 10 years old.According to a bombshell
report, which appeared in the Spanish-language news site Urgente24.com, the priest, Jose Garcia Ataulfo, was
absolved of any wrongdoing by the Archdiocese of Mexico.Ataulfo has admitted to
sexually assaulting indigenous young girls from Oaxaca, a state in southern
Mexico known for its large indigenous population.The priest has yet to
face any criminal charges, most likely due to the significant influence that
the Catholic Church wields in Mexico, particularly in areas populated by
indigenous ethnic groups.

According to Urgente24.com, only two of the over two dozen rape victims have
come forward to denounce the acquittal.

The website Anonymous Mexico reported that the mother of one of
the victims asked to meet with Pope Francis in Rome, but she was rebuffed by
the Vatican which wrote a letter stating that it considered the matter closed.

Sexual abuse of minors by priests – and the
subsequent cover-ups by bishops and other Church officials - have been
widespread in many countries, including the United States.

The [Boston] Globe exposé, which detailed abuse cases that numbered in the thousands
over a span of several decades, inspired other victims to come forward, leading
to an avalanche of lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

Not only did the
floodgates open in the US, but the Catholic Church was also forced to confront
cases in other countries, including Mexico.

I am of an age where can recall drills in elementary school in particular where students participated in safety drills to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear attack on America and how the basement level of the high school building was a fallout shelter. The foe that would such an attack, of course was Russia. Later, I would learn more about Russia and Russian history - an interest sparked in part by having Anna Anderson, perhaps the leading claimant to be Grand
Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, as a neighbor for two years while in college in Charlottesville (I still do not fully believe supposed DNA proof that she was a fake given the British royal family's history of screwing over Russian relatives). For the last 99 years, Russia has been ruled by murderous despots. That trend continues under Vladimir Putin. And sadly, Russia remains a principal foe of America as has been the case since the fall of the Romanov dynasty other than during the interlude of World War II when the common foe of Hitler and Nazi Germany caused a temporary alliance.

Now, Russia seems to want a perhaps unholy alliance with America through the vehicle of Donald Trump, a man who likely would like to emulate Putin's dictatorial rule in this country (in Trump's world, I suspect the rest of us exist merely to increase his own perceived magnificence), More frighteningly, for the first time in my memory Russia intelligence and spy services seem poised to try to influence an American presidential election to insure that Trump is elected. The irony, of course is that Trump supporters view themselves as "real Americans" even as they support a man who likely would sell out American interest to a foreign enemy. A piece at Yahoo News looks at how one of Trump's advisors is under investigation for Russian ties. Here are highlights:

U.S. intelligence officials
are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald
Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private
communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the
possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes
president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.

The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who
has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior
members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow
to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those
briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey,
citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and
“high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow over the summer as evidence of
“significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin
that needed to be investigated by the bureau.

Some of those briefed were “taken aback” when they
learned about Page’s contacts in Moscow, viewing them as a possible back
channel to the Russians that could undercut U.S. foreign policy, said a
congressional source familiar with the briefings but who asked for anonymity
due to the sensitivity of the subject. The source added that U.S. officials in
the briefings indicated that intelligence reports about the adviser’s talks
with senior Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin were being
“actively monitored and investigated.”

A senior U.S. law enforcement official did not
dispute that characterization when asked for comment by Yahoo News. “It’s on
our radar screen,” said the official about Page’s contacts with Russian
officials. “It’s being looked at.”

Trump first mentioned Page’s name when
asked to identify his “foreign policy team” during aninterview with the Washington Post editorial teamlast March. Describing him then only as a “PhD,” Trump named
Page as among five advisers “that we are dealing with.” But his precise role in
the campaign remains unclear; Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks last month
called him an“informal foreign adviser”who “does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.”

The questions about Page come amid
mounting concerns within the U.S. intelligence community about Russian
cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and state election databases
in Arizona and Illinois. In a rare public talk this week, former undersecretary
of defense for intelligence Mike Vickers said that the Russian cyberattacks
constituted meddling in the U.S. election and were “beyond the pale.”

Page came to the attention of officials
at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow several years ago when he showed up in the
Russian capital during several business trips and made provocative public
comments critical of U.S. policy and sympathetic to Putin. “He was pretty much
a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did,” said one U.S. official who served
in Russia at the time.

Page showed up again in Moscow in early
July, just two weeks before the Republican National Convention formally
nominated Trump for president, and once again criticized U.S. policy. Speaking
at a commencement address for the New Economic School, an institution funded in
part by major Russian oligarchs close to Putin, Page asserted that “Washington
and other West capitals” had impeded progress in Russia “through their often
hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and
regime change.”

U.S. officials have since received
intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with
Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime
minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil
company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That
meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials
because the Treasury Department in August 2014 named Sechin to a list of
Russian officials and businessmen sanctioned over Russia’s “illegitimate and
unlawful actions in the Ukraine.”

Trump and Putin must think Americans are fools and idiots. In the case of Trump's supporters, they are sadly correct in that view. The "real Americans" are being duped into supporting a man ready to sell out American interests to inflate his own ego and perhaps enrich himself as Putin has done. Be afraid.

The Hampton Roads region is finally coming out of a period of widespread flooding on the par with what one would normally expect during a hurricane direct hit or close encounter. Yet, there was no hurricane. Just steady rain for numerous days in a row combined with high tides - combined with rising sea levels - that block storm drainage systems from doing their jobs. And it was just Norfolk that suffered major flooding. Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Chesapeake and other cities were stricken. Indeed, schools were closed because of the impassable nature of many roads. All is proof positive of the reality of climate change. Despite such objective proof, Republicans and Donald Trump in particular continue to push policies that will lead to climate disaster. A piece in Think Progress looks at the terrifying policies favored by liar and vulgarian in chief, Donald Trump. Here are excerpts:

On Thursday, Donald Trump
spoke before an audience full of natural gas and energy industry leaders — and
the message was exactly the same as his economic policy proposal from last
week: fewer environmental regulations and more land available to fossil fuel
companies.

If
elected president, Trump has pledged to revoke both theClean
Power Planand President Obama’sClimate
Action Plan, the cornerstones of Obama’s domestic climate agenda,
and important signals to the international community of the United States’
commitment to climate action.

Trump has also promised to roll back
the Waters of the United States Rule, which would extend drinking water
protections formillions of
Americans. Instead, he said that he would redirect the EPA
to “refocus…on its core mission of ensuring clean air, and clean, safe drinking
water for all Americans.”

Trump does not seem to
understand that regulations he so deeply wants to cut are crucial to preserving
clean air, and clean, safe drinking water for all Americans.

A recent Harvard studyfound that the public health benefits
of the Clean Power Plan are so robust that they outweigh the costs of the
carbon standard in 13 out of 14 power sectors within five years of
implementation. The same study estimated that the plan could save some 3,500
lives every year. Similarly, the Waters of the United States rule would protect
the drinking water fora third of Americansthat currently get their water from
unprotected sources.

Beyond
rolling back crucial protections, Trump’s speech on Thursday showed that he
does not intend to back down on his policy proposal that would openup vast
regions of the United States to fossil fuel production.

“Trump’s
dirty-fuels-first plan is pretty simple: drill enough off our coasts to
threaten beaches from Maine to Florida, frack enough to spoil groundwater
across the nation, and burn enough coal to cook the planet and make our kids
sick,” Pitts said in a statement. “In stark contrast, Hillary Clinton is the
only candidate in this race who is committed to grow the booming clean energy
economy to create jobs and help tackle the climate crisis.”

One of the most maddening thing about the 2016 election cycle is the failure of the news media to accurately report on the magnitude of the lies Donald Trump engages in daily. The danger for the nation is that by not accurately reporting on the fact that Trump lies many times more than Clinton and that in the quest of appearing unbiased, the media has given Trump a free pass over and over again. True, most of Trump's hard core base care nothing about the man's dishonesty so long as his statements and demagoguery play to their racial and social prejudices. But after allowing - indeed assisting - America to go to war in Iraq based on lies that failed to be exposed and challenged, one would think that the mainstream media would have learned a lesson. Monday night's first presidential debate will be a test of whether the media puts reporting the truth and exposing lies still matters or whether much of the media will prove to be Trump sycophants. A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous issue. Here are highlights:

Here’s what we can be fairly sure will happen in Monday’s presidential
debate: Donald Trump will lie repeatedly and grotesquely, on a variety of subjects.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton might say a couple of untrue things. Or she might
not.

Here’s what we don’t know:
Will the moderators step in when Mr. Trump delivers one of his well-known,
often reiterated falsehoods? If he claims, yet again, to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning — which he didn’t —
will he be called on it? If he claims to have renounced birtherism years ago,
will the moderators note that he was still at it just a few months ago? . . . . . If he says one more time that America is the
world’s most highly taxed country — which it isn’t — will anyone other than
Mrs. Clinton say that it isn’t? And will media coverage after the debate convey
the asymmetry of what went down?

[A]t this point we have long track records for both Mr. Trump and Mrs.
Clinton; thanks to nonpartisan fact-checking operations like PolitiFact, we can
even quantify the difference.

PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statementsand classified them on a
scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of
the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two
candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling.
Mr. Trump had 48 Pants on Fire ratings, Mrs. Clinton just six; the G.O.P.
nominee had 89 False ratings, the Democrat 27.

Unless
one candidate has a nervous breakdown or a religious conversion in the next few
days, the debate will follow similar lines. So how should it be reported? . . .
What I suggest is that reporters and news organizations treat time and
attention span as a sort of capital budget that must be allocated across
coverage.

And if the debate looks anything like the campaign so far, we know
what that will mean: a news analysis that devotes at least five times as much
space to Mr. Trump’s falsehoods as to Mrs. Clinton’s.

If your reaction is, “Oh,
they can’t do that — it would look like partisan bias,” you have just
demonstrated the huge problem with news coverage during this election. For I am
not calling on the news media to take a side; I’m just calling on it to report
what is actually happening, without regard for party. In fact, any reporting
that doesn’t accurately reflect the huge honesty gap between the candidates
amounts to misleading readers, giving them a distorted picture that favors the
biggest liar.

Yet there are, of course,
intense pressures on the news media to engage in that distortion. Point out a
Trump lie and you will get some pretty amazing mail — and if we set aside the
attacks on your race or ethnic group, accusations that you are a traitor, etc.,
most of it will declare that you are being a bad journalist because you don’t
criticize both candidates equally.

One
all-too-common response to such attacks involves abdicating responsibility for
fact-checking entirely, and replacing it with theater criticism. . . . . news reporting should tell the public what really happened, not be
devoted to speculation about how other people might react to what happened.

Now, what will I say if Mr.
Trump lies less than I predict and Mrs. Clinton more? That’s easy: Tell it like
it is. But don’t grade on a curve. If Mr. Trump lies only three times as much
as Mrs. Clinton, the main story should still be that he lied a lot more than
she did, not that he wasn’t quite as bad as expected.

Again, I’m not calling on the news media to take sides;
journalists should simply do their job, which is to report the facts. It may
not be easy — but doing the right thing rarely is.

With some polls showing a tightening in the presidential race, Wall Street, which seems to have never believed Trump could be actually elected, is beginning to freak out at the thought of a Trump presidency and the disaster that it would unleash on the financial markets, international trade and a host of other issues. The irony is that Trump claims incessantly that he is such an amazing businessman, yet by many reports he is being propped up by Russian monies from questionable sources and Wall Street sees him as not being up to the task of the presidency. A scripted reality TV and running a super power are vastly different, not that the narcissistic Trump seem able to grasp the difference. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the growing angst and fear on Wall Street. Here are highlights:

The U.S. stock market, seven years into an almost nonstop bull run,
went on a wild ride last week: The Dow Jones Industrial Average swung between
100 and 200 points — up one day, down the next — on four separate days. There
hasn’t been such a bout of volatility since late June, when the U.K.’s surprise
vote to exit the European Union sent markets on a roller-coaster ride.
Volatility is not just apparent in the stock market either. Wall Street
strategists say it’s also cropping up in the bond and foreign-exchange markets.

Global
markets are jittery about many things right now, but one fear seems to override
all others: The polls in the presidential race have suddenly tightened, and
Donald Trump might actually become president of the United States of America —
with unknown, but possibly very negative, implications for everything from
trade policy to foreign relations to monetary policy.

In
short, a Trump presidency is the very definition of what markets hate:
uncertainty. “Trump is widely considered to be reckless and Clinton is widely
considered to be a friend to Wall Street,” explains Chris Irons, an analyst
with the equityresearch
firm GeoInvesting.

Société Générale analysts call it the “Trump factor.” They argue that
the tightening of the polls between Trump and Clinton is a big reason for a
sell-off in global bonds in September, which has led to the unease in equity
markets, Bloombergreportedon
Tuesday. Rates on both long-term Treasury and Japanese bonds have been rising
since the polls started tightening, SocGen says.

A
tightening of the race is normal, and might seem inevitable after the huge lead
Clinton took following the Democratic National Convention and the Khizr Khan
affair. But investors seemed to start selling when Trump took the lead in the
crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida.

In general, markets prefer a Clinton victory. In a new CNBCsurveyof
economists, fund managers, and strategists, 53 percent think Clinton is better
for the stock market than Trump — because she’s a known quantity, and a person
whose ability to relate to foreign leaders is comforting. Only 26 percent of
those surveyed think Trump is better for stocks, down from 32 percent the prior
month. Some market prognosticators havesuggesteda win by Trump could send the stock
market down at least 10 percent.

“I
don’t know what the U.S. dollar is worth with a Trump victory. I don’t know
what it does to foreign flows into theU.S.,”
says Josh Brown, CEO of financial adviser Ritzholtz Wealth Management. “Are
foreign corporations as desirous of owningUS
dollars with someone so erratic in the White House?”

[T]he concern on Wall Street is whether or not Trump knows what he is
talking about — or even cares. In recent weeks, for example, he has been
bashing Fed Chair Janet Yellen, blaming the Fed for creating a “false economy”
and an “artificial stock market” in aninterviewwith Reuters, saying the Fed
needs to raise rates. But Trump also says the economy is a disaster. “Which is
it?” asks Brown, noting that if the economy is truly a disaster, rates would
need to stay low. (Trump also changes his mind a lot, which Wall Street doesn’t
like. This spring, hesaidraising
rates would be “scary.”)

Wall
Street economists have long warned that a Trump presidency could increase the
chances for a recession. In an August 25research note, Citigroup chief economist
Willem Buiter wrote that “a Trump victory could prolong and perhaps exacerbate
policy uncertainty and deliver a shock (though perhaps short-lived) to
financial markets. Tightening financial conditions and further rises in
uncertainty could trigger a significant slowdown in U.S., but also global
growth.”

“When
you lay out the possibilities of what can happen with Clinton, it’s far more
predictable. Whenyou lay out what could happen with Trump, we could be at war
with Canada.”

Despite such fears, the ignorance embracing Christofascists, white supremacist and economically challenged white males are putting their hopes in a vulgar carnival barker.

There are some members of the gays community - delusional ones, in my opinion - who try to argue that Donald Trump is the most "pro-gay" of the presidential candidates. Similarly, I have had Republican friends (perhaps brainwashed by Fox News) try to argue that Hillary Clinton is not really a friend of the LGBT community and that some of my posts have been unduly harsh toward Trump. Having been authoring this blog and following political issues from an LGBT perspective for over nine (9) years and having been a political activist for over two decades, I beg to differ with such criticisms of Clinton and, in my opinion, unsupportable claims favoring Trump. I do not see myself as a single issue voter - health care reform (I favor a single payer national system), addressing climate change, immigration reform, fixing a dysfunctional economic model are but some of the issues that hold my attention. But as a member of the LGBT community who has first hand experienced being fired for being gay, harassed by homophobic police, and threatened with physical harm by homophobes, I cannot ignore how important the 2016 presidential election is for LGBT Americans. The main editorial in the October print issue of The Advocate makes the case for Hillary Clinton wonderfully well. Here are excerpts:

Elections
matter, and this election dramatizes that notion like no other. This is only
the second presidential endorsement byThe
Advocate; the first was for President Obama’s second term. Prior to 2012,
there had never been an Oval Office candidate — or incumbent — who fully
embraced marriage equality, an essential position to earn this publication’s
endorsement.

NowThe
Advocate endorses Hillary Clinton with enthusiasm.

Clinton has made LGBT inclusion a pillar of her campaign,
from the first video announcing her candidacy. She has produced the most
complete and impressive LGBT platform of any presidential candidate ever. In
it, she has vowed to champion theEquality Act, the legislation that would enact federal
nondiscrimination protections with regard to sexual orientation and gender
identity. Clinton’s policy platform called for an end to the ban on transgender
military service —now officially gone— an end
to quack “conversion therapy” for minors, an end to discrimination against LGBT
families in adoptions, improved school conditions for LGBT students, expanded
shelters for homeless LGBT youth, affordable treatment for people with HIV,
expanded access to PrEP, expanded data collection and other measures to stem
the disproportionate violence against trans people, and improved access to
correct identification for trans people, along with many other positions that
directly affect the rights, health, and welfare of our communities.

Clinton
has raised these issues with consistency during the primary season, and they
have become a hallmark of her campaign heading into the general election.

Clinton’s opponent, real estate investor and reality-show
host Donald Trump, has no voting record and an arm’s-length relationship with
the truth, making his policy positions hard to pin down. But the Republican
nominee has indicated his eagerness to abandon civil rights in pursuit of an
electoral win. His selection of Indiana governor Mike Pence (a sop to the
conservative base), who rose to national prominence by signing a disastrously
discriminatory anti-LGBT bill into law, underscores Trump’s abject refutation
of LGBT rights as a principle he considers with any seriousness.

While in Congress,Pence voted against the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the Matthew
Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act.He opposes
marriage equality and supports traumatic “conversion therapy.”

Trump’s own statements make him an unsuitable choice for the
presidency. The stakes are far too high for LGBT Americans, when so much
progress for our rights has been advanced under Obama’s leadership. . .
. . He has vowed that if elected president, he would rescind Obama’s executive
orders that protect trans people from discrimination in health care coverage
and in public schools, and the executive order that bans discrimination against
LGBT employees of federal contractors (which comprise an estimated 20 percent
of the American workforce). He has endorsed the unconstitutional First
Amendment Defense Act, a nationalized version of a RFRA, and has said he’s
interested in appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn theObergefell marriage equality ruling. He’d leave
marriage equality, access to insurance, employment nondiscrimination, and the
option to deny people the use of school and public bathrooms to the states.

Clinton
is a calm, deliberative leader with decades of public service experience and an
impressive command of policy, detail, and the concerns of overlapping minority
communities. Whereas Trump alienates women, Muslims, immigrants, and LGBT
people, Clinton’s record as a U.S. senator is marked by bipartisanship, and her
campaign is marked by inclusivity.

To imagine that the election result is a foregone conclusion
— that Clinton will handily and easily defeat Trump in November without serious
effort on the part of an engaged electorate — is a mistake. The U.K.’s Brexit
vote is an example of left-leaning activists and voters wrongly assuming that
voters will exercise “common sense.”

There is no foregone conclusion. There is no obvious outcome.
But there is only one capable candidate in this election, and only one
candidate who is a champion of LGBT causes. That clear and necessary choice is
Hillary Clinton.

Despite the statements of President Obama and others that Saudi Arabia is an important ally, I, as noted in many prior posts, see Saudi Arabia as a leading, if not number one, financial supporter of Islamic extremism and the terror that seems to go hand in hand with Islamic fundamentalism and Wahhabi strain of Islam in particular. Add to this Saudi Arabia' horrific human rights violations and the nation should be anathema to America and its founding principles. Thankfully, members of Congress form both parties seem to be waking up to the reality that with a "friend" like Saudi Arabia, one doesn't need enemies. The Washington Post looks at the much deserved Congressional scrutiny now facing America's false ally. Here are excerpts:

A series of
bills before Congress this month is the surest sign yet that Saudi
Arabia can no longer claim the privileged status it has held largely
unchallenged for decades in Washington.

As the fight over terrorism escalates, lawmakers on Capitol
Hill are taking aim at the longtime U.S. ally with a double-header of
legislative rebukes to the Kingdom over its alleged ties to extremists and
military campaigns in Yemen. The first came Wednesday, when the Senate voted on
aresolutionto restrict arms sales to Saudi Arabia
until it stops targeting civilians in Yemen. Congress is alsopreparing to overridean expected presidential veto this
week of a bill to let the families of Sept. 11 victims sue Saudi Arabia over
alleged ties to the terrorists who carried out the attack.

While the two measures will not both get through Congress –
there is wide support for the Sept. 11 bill, but senators voted down
Wednesday’s attempt to stop the arms sale – experts say the current scrutiny of
the U.S.-Saudi relationship is unprecedented.

“We haven’t seen this much anti-Saudi activity on the Hill in
a quarter of a century,” said Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings
Institution’s Intelligence Project and an expert on Saudi Arabia. “Criticism of
Saudi Arabia has come out of the closet, and I don’t think it’s going to go
back in.”

Though
the Kingdom remains a critical ally in the global fight against terror, Western
leaders have publicly criticized it for financially and politically promoting
an Islamic fundamentalist worldview espoused by many extremist groups.
International human rights groups, meanwhile, have openly condemned Saudi
Arabia for violating the laws of war in Yemen with “logistical, tactical, and
intelligence support” from the United States.

Saudi
Arabia has a serious image problem it must confront. . . . Nowhere
is that trend clearer than in the Sept. 11 victims’ bill, which would give
courts the right to waive claims to foreign sovereign immunity in cases
involving terrorist acts on U.S. soil.

Riyadh launched
a formidable campaign to kill the bill with Saudi Arabia spending in
excess of $3 million this year on lobbying contracts, according to Foreign
Agents Registration Act documents. . . . s Congress prepares to soon
override an expected veto of the bill, Saudi Arabia has launched a last-minute
lobbying blitz.

Representatives of the government and its allies have been
frequenting lawmakers’ offices to plead for help.

According to a recent study published in the Guardian, one in
three Saudi-led raids in Yemen hit civilians..
. . . Recently, images and videos from Yemen have suggested that Saudi
Arabia is using U.S.-producedwhite phosphorus in Yemen as well.

Yet the
measure’s authors say the arms sales are part of a greater, problematic trend
that the United States is allowing Saudi Arabia to get away, literally, with
murder.

“We have largely turned the other way and allowed for the
Saudis to create a version of Islam which has become the building blocks for
the very groups that we are fighting today. And we have plead with them, we
have asked them to stop, and the evidence suggests they have not,” Sen. Chris
Murphy (D-Conn.) said during an event at the Center for the National Interest
this week.

[E]xperts said
criticizing Saudi Arabia has become “almost fashionable” and congressional
scrutiny of the alliance is only likely to grow more intense.

“I think the era in which you could get $110 billion worth of
arms through the Congress with virtually no debate on the Hill is over,” he
said. “And if there’s an ugly settlement over 9/11, and the Yemen war
continues, that debate will get tougher and tougher for the Saudis to win.”

As noted before, a top American national security goal should be to expand alternate energy sources and a sharp decline in dependence on oil. If America and Europe can reach self-sufficiency, then Saudi Arabia's ability to engage in economic blackmail will be gone as will its ability to fund terrorism. Americans need to wake up to the reality that the Saudis and the toxic religion they support are our enemy.

In any number of post now, I have addressed the disturbing apparent efforts of Russian hackers to harm Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, Donald trump's dependence on Russian money to keep many of his project afloat, the bizarre bromance between Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the use by both Putin and Trump to employ techniques used by Hitler to come to power. An op-ed in the New York Times looks at how Putin and Russian Fascist ideas are meddling in America's 2016 election cycle. Some laugh off the idea, but a closer look should give one pause. Here are op-ed highlights:

The president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, once described
the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” But the
political thinker who today has the most influence on Mr. Putin’s Russia is not
Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Communist system, but rather Ivan Ilyin, a
prophet of Russian fascism.

The brilliant political philosopher
has been dead for more than 60 years, but his ideas have found new life in
post-Soviet Russia. After 1991, his books were republished with long print
runs. President Putin began to cite him in his annual speech to the Federal
Assembly, the Russian equivalent of the State of the Union address.

To
complete the rehabilitation, Mr. Putin saw to it that Ilyin’s corpse was
repatriated from Switzerland, and that his archive was returned from Michigan.
The Russian president has been seen laying flowers on Ilyin’s Moscow grave.

Ilyin believed that individuality was evil. For him, the “variety of
human beings” demonstrated the failure of God to complete the labor of creation
and was therefore essentially satanic. By extension, the middle classes,
political parties and civil society were also evil, because they encouraged the
development of personalities beyond the single identity of the national
community.

According
to Ilyin, the purpose of politics is to overcome individuality, and establish a
“living totality” of the nation. . . . . he provided the outlines for a constitution
of a fascist Holy Russia governed by a “national dictator” who would be
“inspired by the spirit of totality.”

This leader would be
responsible for all functions of government in a completely centralized state.
Elections would be held, with open voting and signed ballots, purely as a
ritual of support of the leader. The reckoning of votes was irrelevant: “We
must reject blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.”

In the light of Ilyin’s rehabilitation as Russia’s leading ideologue,
Moscow’s manipulations of elections should be seen not so much as a failure to
implement democracy but as a subversion of the very concept of democracy. Neither the parliamentary elections of
December 2011 nor the presidential elections of March 2012 produced a majority
for Mr. Putin’s party or for Mr. Putin personally. Votes were therefore added
to produce a decisive result.

Russians who protested the fixed
elections were branded as national enemies. Nongovernmental organizations were
forced to register as “foreign agents.”

While
Russian leaders consciously work to hollow out the idea of democracy in their
own country, they also seek to discredit democracy abroad — including, this
year, in the United States. Russia’s interventions in our presidential
elections are not only the opportunistic support of a preferred candidate,
Donald J. Trump, who backs Russian foreign policy. They are also the logical
projection of the new ideology: Democracy is not a means of changing leadership
at home, but a means of weakening enemies abroad.

If democracy is merely an invitation to foreign influence, then
hacking a foreign political party’s email is the most natural thing in the
world. If civil society is nothing but the decadent opening of a rotting
society to foreign influence, then constant trolling of media is obviously
appropriate. If, as Ilyin wrote, the “arithmetical understanding of politics”
is harmful, then digital meddling in foreign elections would be just the thing.

For a decade, Russia has
been sponsoring right-wing extremists as “election observers” — most recently,
in the farcical referendums in the Crimea and in the Donbas region of Ukraine —
in order to discredit both elections and their observation.Since democracy is a sham, as Ilyin believed, then it is right and
good to imitate its language and procedures in order to discredit it. It is
noteworthy that the Trump campaign has now imitated this very practice,
supplying both its own private “observers” and the advance conclusion about the
fraud they will find.

The
technique of undermining democracy abroad is to generate doubt where there had
been certainty. If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, then
democratic ideas will seem questionable as well. And so America would become
more like Russia, which is the general idea. If Mr. Trump wins, Russia wins.
But if Mr. Trump loses and people doubt the outcome, Russia also wins.

From
Moscow’s point of view, it is easier to bring down democracy everywhere than it
is to hold free, fair elections at home. Russia will seem stronger if other
states follow its course of development toward a cynicism about democracy that
allows authoritarianism to thrive.

What frightens me is that Trump very likely seems himself as the "national dictator" Ilyn envisioned. And then there is his use of Hitler's tactics and demagoguery and scapegoating of minorities.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
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